There is, to be sure, much more to Ricky Martin's debut English album than ""Livin' La Vida Loca."" But, for a moment, let's pretend that there isn't. Let's pretend that it's little more than 14 tracks of vacuous, salsa-flavored pop. Would that be so bad? After all, the airwaves in other countries are filled with the stuff, and they've all got much lower homicide rates. Would it be such a terrible sin to have an album full of maddeningly catchy, instantly memorable, preternaturally fun music made by a man so sexy he could make your mother and your little sister both swoon? In stuffy, thuggified 1999, the answer is a resounding ""no."" Because when your radio options are limited to cranky rockers pretending their problems are important, tougher-than-thou gangstas recycling disco lite, and a seemingly endless barrage of Brand New Kids On The Block, ""La Vida Loca"" comes across like radio's savior. That the song is one that a band can play and you can sing along to without having to mutter ""unggh"" makes it damn near revolutionary.

But (and you knew this was coming), Ricky Martin isn't just 14 versions of ""La Vida Loca."" With a sound that manages to bridge the gaping chasm between mature popcraft and loopy fun, Martin has cultivated the lessons learned from tenures with Menudo (goofy pop artifice) and General Hospital (goofy sexual artifice) and, for most of the past decade, has been busy entertaining massive audiences everywhere but America with his infectious, engaging stage presence and relentlessly catchy take on Latin Pop. Gallantly staking his claim as the musical sex symbol of 1999, Martin delivered an album full of songs that make his claim much easier to handle for those that actually demand that their musical sex symbols actually make good music. When Martin gets all syrupy sweet on ""You Stay With Me"" or when he and Swedish uberstar Meja duet on the naggingly bombastic ""Private Emotion,"" it's a little tough to align ""good music"" with what you're hearing. But, on a track like ""Shake Your Bon-Bon,"" which, besides having a moronic title, grooves so hard and fast that it seems like a pop missive straight from a textbook, you realize that there is a definite art to making hypnotically fun music.

Of course, the schematic here is ""relentlessly upbeat with moments of saccharine balladry"" and Martin finds success on every level. ""La Copa de la Vida"" gets a ""Spanglish"" treatment. ""Love You For A Day"" resuscitates the discofied salsa sound Gloria Estefan built an entire career on, and ""Spanish Eyes"" is so cornily catchy it works, while ballads like ""I Count the Minutes"" are bearably hammy. Ironically, the least successful moment on the record comes when Martin and Madonna team up on ""Be Careful,"" an obviously hasty attempt for Maddy to get a little closer to her new ""inspiration."" However, it's the only sore spot on what is perhaps the brightest pop album of the last decade: an album so devoid of irony, toughness, and 13-year-olds that it may very well make radio a safe place for pop again. Viva la revolution!